With this innovative system, you can get fast, top-quality framing with no waste and no mistakes

All of the material in the
conventionally framed wall system for this ski company
housing project was pre-cut and shipped from about 450
miles away.

Pre-cut, prefabricated, and modular systems all have
inherent benefits and drawbacks. My first attempt at
prefabrication using an "automated" assembly line setup was a
full wall panel on a multifamily project, calculated and drawn
by hand. Although this approach was crude, it was surprisingly
effective. I created a layout book and began building prefab
walls. I took the book home at night and used white-out for
minor adjustments, redrawing and pasting in larger corrections.
It changed day to day, but by the time the project was in full
swing, we had a product that worked very, very well.
Prior to that, for about 10 or 15 years, we did everything
we could think of in conventional prefab, including arches,
drop ceilings, and framed roof details. Everything we did
seemed to pay off. Most notable was the amount of waste, which
was next to nothing. And as our construction company's market
expanded from New Mexico into places like Aspen and Vail,
Colo., where labor is both scarce and expensive, I thought
prefabrication would still be the answer to all our clients'
needs.
Shipping air. But I eventually discovered the
Achilles' heel of panelized walls — freight costs. You
can turn one tractor-trailer load of lumber into six truckloads
of walls. Any savings you realize from the efficiency of
panelization is eaten up by the cost of shipping. The term in
the business is "shipping air." Somehow I had to use what I had
learned about assembly line techniques to achieve a competitive
edge.

A System Evolves

My answer to the problem was to do a partial, or hybrid,
prefab. I would pre-cut all the walls, lay out the plates,
build the components, and ship packages of wall plates and
bundles of components to the site for assembly. The advantage
of this process is efficiency; speed, accuracy, quality
control, no mistakes, no storage problems, and optimal use of
labor.

Halfway there

. We
realized some of the benefits of factory-style fabrication, but
there were drawbacks. The projects that we shipped were fairly
complex, with up to fifty different units of components,
including headers, trimmers, channels, and corners, all of
various sizes. When a crew would break into a unit of pre-cut,
pre-laid-out lumber, they would spend half the day roaming a
field of stacked components, gathering one of this, four of
that, and so on. This was not an efficient way to build. Many
of the projects that we contracted for were on small sites, and
we simply did not have the room to spread out. A different
approach was required.

Freeze-dried walls

. The
idea started to gel as I watched a documentary on climbers
attempting to scale Mount Everest. I saw them huddled in their
tents preparing freeze-dried meals thousands of feet above the
nearest stove top. "Why not freeze-dried walls?" I thought. The
idea is to bundle a plate, component, hardware, and nail
package. Just add a little labor, and you have a panelized
building package, miles away from the nearest prefab plant.
Of course, the thing about great ideas is that unless you
have the right people to execute them, they remain just ideas.
Luckily for me, I did have the right people. We are now turning
out neat, easy-to-ship "freeze-dried" units — about four
or five projects a year — 60,000 to 180,000 square feet
each, and assembling them within about a 500-mile radius of our
headquarters in Albuquerque, N.M.

Hybrid Prefabrication

My process is not a true prefab operation because we don't
actually assemble the plates and components into finished wall
panels. It is actually a pre-cut framing package (see Figure
1), composed of everything required to frame a hotel or
apartment unit completely. You may have seen similar packages
on piecework frames in California. We have taken that concept a
few steps farther. While we developed the system with
multifamily projects in mind, it could work equally well for
tracts or large custom projects.

On one semi-truck we can typically ship enough pre-cut,
labeled, and packaged material to cover a 20,000-square-foot
area in walls. Each banded, wrapped, and numbered package
measures 4 feet wide and 16 feet long. The height depends on
the size and complexity of the unit. Units are designed to fit
two abreast, three units end to end, and stacked 8 feet high
— about 23,000 pounds.
Along with every prenailed subcomponent required (such as
sills, cripples, headers, trimmer assemblies, corners,
channels, nails, and hardware) our packages include every plate
— cut to length and detailed per the plan. Every member
is labeled, nailed, drilled, and fitted as required. Every
package includes a dimensioned layout and placement plan and a
plastic-wrapped shipping list with a printout of exactly what
pieces are included. This includes a list of the wall plates,
indicating the width and length of each wall, as well as
elevations for walls where additional clarity would be
helpful.
Quality and efficiency. Every step of our
process has multiple quality controls built in. Quality is our
foremost concern, because the product that we are shipping will
be delivered to carpenters who are paid twice as much as our
prefab team. Plus, the men in the field are working in far
rougher conditions: limited space, snow, cold weather, and so
on. Our goal is to take half the work and all the thinking out
of framing.

Where To Start

The process starts with a careful review of the plans, which
enables us to catch discrepancies early on that might lead to
problems in the field. My associate, Christopher Head, who has
training in both architecture and framing, inputs data into a
commercially available computerized wall-panel design system
(Figure 2). He is very methodical, and when he prints out a set
of walls, you know they are going to work like a charm.

Figure
2. It all starts with a careful review of the
drawings and a Keymark design system. Mistakes are a
lot cheaper and easier to correct on paper than during
cutting or assembly.

Once the input and design have been completed and any
problems resolved, a complete set of shop drawings is printed
and forwarded to the project architect for review. These
documents, along with any adjustments required by the
architect, become our Bible for the project.